Greece versus the Puritans

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”—H. L. Mencken

A fault line runs across Western
culture. On one side the Puritan work ethic rules the economy; on the
other it's something else. In America the line is the Rio Grande; the
exception is French Canada. In Europe the line is roughly defined by
the Alps; the exception is Ireland.

France, by this reckoning, is at the center of the
world, where it belongs. England is across a narrow channel from a
Mediterranean country.

So we might say that Catholicism, Roman
or Orthodox, is that "something else," though it seems to me that
religions arise out of peoples, not the other way around—Nordic barbarians on the one hand, ancient civilizations on the other. South of the Alps people have been civilized—settled,
living together, absorbing invaders—for four thousand years (the old
polytheism peeks out from Catholicism), while our own ancestors were
still roaming the Siberian steppes.

Shakespeare
was a civilized man, yes, but his London was barbaric. The British as a
people didn’t get there until Victoria, when Puritanism finally took
hold. Civilization is middle-class; the aristocrat, Nietzsche tells us,
is a barbarian. It’s fair to say that the British have been civilized
for only a hundred and fifty years. Not long before that my people
painted their faces before going into battle.
(See My Racial Profile.)

We mustn’t confuse Puritanism with
prudery. Jean-Luc Godard, William Burroughs, Paul Schrader and David
Lynch are Puritans, but their work can be pornographic. Vladimir Nabokov
on the other hand was prudish, but in no way puritanical.

The Puritan is a dualist: soul/body,
good/evil. The world, for a Puritan, is a temptation to be got through.
The Catholic is a monist who believes in the earthly paradise. A few
adjustments will restore it. When the Pope disembarks from a plane he
gets down on his belly and kisses the ground. You won’t find the
Archbishop of Canterbury doing that.

Puritanism forbids images. An image is
false. Truth is elsewhere. The sources of Puritanism in our culture are
Moses and Plato. The second commandment forbids images. Plato banished
image-makers from his Republic.

According to Freud’s theory Moses was a
defeated Egyptian prince who led the Hebrew slaves away from
image-saturated Egypt to establish a monotheism; but when he came down
the mountain he found them backsliding, adoring an image, the bull
calf—which by the way had also been worshipped in Minoan Crete, as it is
today in India and Spain. (The bullfight, says Garcia Lorca, contra
Hemingway, is “an authentic religious drama, where in the same manner as
in the Mass, a God is adored and sacrificed.”)

To forbid images is to impose
abstraction. All three puritan traditions, Judaism, Islam and
Protestantism, emphasize reading and abstract thinking. The Muslims
invented the zero, a huge feat of abstraction, and algebra, and gave us our numbers.

But the early Church, with illiterate
peasants and slaves to reach, had to interpret the second commandment as
not to worship “false gods.” Walk into a Catholic or an Orthodox church
and there are images on the walls, in the windows, on the ceiling, on
the floor. The first thing Puritans do is smash the statues and break
the stained glass.

Without the Catholic tradition we
wouldn’t have Giotto, Botticelli, Giorgione. There was no Jewish oil
painter of note until Chagall. In America, where abstraction is the
rule, painting has been reduced to the bathroom tile of Jackson Pollock.

Nor does physics permit images. The
imagination is bound by Euclid’s laws: the shortest distance between two
points, the three angles of a triangle. Newton built his universe in
Euclid’s space. But when our telescopes became strong enough, and our
cameras fast enough, to record the movements of galaxies, we saw that
they did not obey those laws.

Imagine three equidistant objects: easy.
Imagine four: a pyramid on a triangular base. Imagine five: can’t be
done. And yet it is so. Five hundred, five thousand galaxies where they
shouldn’t be: we cannot construct a model of our universe. We cannot
imagine it.

The image induces orgasm. You imagine her even when you’re having her. You imagine her even when you’re not having her. Hence the veil.

Ten years ago in Afghanistan, despite
the world’s outrage, the Taliban dynamited giant Buddhas carved in the
living rock; they were images and they had to go. Muslims on the other
hand were outraged by the Danish cartoons of the Prophet—not so much that they mocked him as that he should have been portrayed in an image at all.

Jean-Luc Godard attacks images; it has
been said that film is not his medium. William Burroughs did the same,
and refused to be labeled an “entertainer,” though that is scarcely
true. Still, these Puritans clear a space for the spirit. If there can
be no adequate image of God, or of reality, then there can be none of
you, which is comforting.

“I found America the friendliest, most
forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South
Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas
people in the United States approach things ethically. This—amateur
Protestant that I am—I admired above all. It even helped me overlook
skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of
gadgets.”—Jorge Luis Borges

The Puritan is a moralist; the Catholic a
mystic. Consider opera, that Catholic art, that rite that
transubstantiates passion into music. What would Protestant opera
sound like? It would sound like Wagner—moralistic, amelodic, German. (See Germans.)

The Puritan believes in “character” in
the sense, not of what distinguishes you from others, but of moral
strength. You stand alone. Monotheism breeds the mono-self. In how many
Catholic works (by “Catholic” I do not mean “Christian”) of Rabelais,
Joyce, Picasso, does one self melt into another.

And so, in the Hollywood movie, we have the all-important “character arc", in which the lead Learns Something. Are you learning anything? You’re gathering skills, I know that, but how’s the penetration of mystery going?

An Irishman kills someone, and runs
north. Burdened by his guilt he seeks out a clergyman and tells him.
“You’ve done the right thing coming to me,” says the minister; “now you
must give yourself up to the authorities.” “I’d rather not,” says the
Irishman. “But you know that it’s my duty to tell them.” He runs.
The police are behind him. He goes south and escapes. Still heavy with
guilt he enters a church; the confessional light is on; he goes in and
kneels in the dark. “Father, I’ve committed murder.” “How many times, my
son?”

The Protestant public is outraged that the Church is not punishing more severely the pedophile priests. Character. “So that’s the kind of man you are!” But the Church believes in the forgiveness of sins, right here in the earthly paradise.

Let us not speak of Catholic and
Protestant; let us speak of Nordic and Mediterranean. For the vulgarity
north of the Alps is just as grotesque as it is in America.

Consider punching. Angry Mediterraneans
shout at each other in the street in a manner that shocks Nordics, in
that it never erupts into fighting. We barbarians love to punch.

Consider drunks. I live in Greece
and so far I’ve met two drunks. Walk down the street in New York,
Toronto or London and look around: we’re all drunks. In an Athens
grocery store you can buy plain alcohol for disinfecting cuts and
cleaning instruments; in those other cities you can get it in a drug
store, but it has an obnoxious smell, so we won’t drink it.

Consider farting which, along with
belching, is a mode of communication in the Anglo-Saxon world. In
Mediterranean countries it’s simply not done.

Oddly, when you think of the disdain of
which America is often the target (“America is the only country that
went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between,” said
Oscar Wilde), civilization took root on the seaboard before it did in
northern Europe, planted there by Puritan middle class intellectuals.
The United States is unique in that it is a country springing from
intellectual principles.

Norman Mailer said Puritanism was the
muscular contraction that brought us to the moon. But it exacts its
price in the impulse to legislate morality—the Mann Act, Prohibition,
abortion laws, the world’s biggest prison population (proportionately and
numerically); in the missionary zeal with which it brings democracy to
people who have no use for it; and in its conviction, right
down to the bone marrow, that the movement of money is the action of
God in the world. Bankers in Protestant countries are priests, their calling invested with high authority, and holy secrecy.

That's the kind of morality a cold climate can produce. The New Age library includes a host of books that will
help us adjust our attitudes and become more deserving. (Character
again: it depends What Kind Of Person You Are.) And today’s Republicans
will stop at nothing to reduce the national deficit and regain divine
favor. (See Lorca's remarks on Wall Street.)

Do you see this going away? I don't.
American fundamentalists are a political force strong enough to have
kept their President in office for eight years and, astonishingly, to
have fought Darwinian evolution for a century. No one understands America’s difficulty with this, and it appears to exercise
the best of the journalistic minds there. There's no contradiction
between creationism and Darwin’s Theory; the Church accepted it a
century ago, and the impermeability on this issue is disturbing
in such a powerful country. (See The Accidental Monkey.) Two fundamentalisms now confront each
other, Islamic and American, degenerations, both, of once higher
cultures. The incidence of suicide bombings on the one hand, and the
gunning down of numbers of people at a time on the other, cannot but
seem connected.

It was the Puritan poet John Milton who
towered over English Romanticism, which was really a kind of secular
Presbyterianism, and each of the poets (except the Shakespearean Keats),
even Worsdworth in his quiet way, took Milton’s Satan as his
psychological model, though Coleridge preferred wailing for him.

Thus was born the Byronic hero, the
Puritan rebel our popular imagination inherits. Marlon Brando was its
fiercest avatar, but the figure remains—that lonely Puritan rebel is still our dominant model.

Here in Greece, as the world now knows,
there is a splendid insouciance about money. At the supermarket, even at
such formal places as the bank and the post office, if you don’t have
the right change, “Pay me next time.” Which means forget it. There is
such an elegance about that, but it makes us positively stutter to
confront it.

The characters in my books, like me,
hang out south of the Alps, not only because they're paradisiacs but
because here they're a little beyond Big Brother's reach.

Ah, but the barbarians are again at the gates.

Afterthoughts:

1) What T.S. Eliot calls the
“dissociation of sensibility” set in with the Puritan revolution—a
schizophrenic scissoring of the mind from the sense of self on the one
hand, and from the world, including the body, on the other. The
corresponding Catholic psychosis is manic-depression. Fellini cuts on
laughter and tears, and 8½ resolves when Guido’s spirits simply lift.

2) "The romantic temper,” says Stephen
Dedalus, “is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no
fit abode here for its ideals." Our own taste for parallel worlds, New
Age projections and internet avatars is a case in point: life is
elsewhere.

3) Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
—W. H. Auden, “Lullaby”

4) Comedy is the Catholic form, as in
Dante; tragedy is the other thing. Robert Graves’s Protestant mother and
Catholic father fell in love with a house in Wales: “Oh,” she said, “I
could die here.” “Let’s live here,” he said.

2 comments:

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